Immunotherapy designed as a cure for cancer

Tehran (ISNA) –A lead scientist at Dana-Farber Cancer Institute, Harvard Medical School noted that Immunotherapy is designed to restore the body’s own complex immune and defense mechanisms to recognize and destroy cancer cells.

“Immunotherapy for cancer is a rapidly developing field, but the story is a complex one. Different cancers have different immunological fingerprints,” says Dr. Amir Reza Aref. “Uncovering how cancer cells avoid cell death and understanding how these pathways might be overturned is a difficult but critical endeavor”.

He said in an exclusive interview with ISNA, “Cancer's ability to elude our body's immune system has long puzzled researchers. The latest study pinpoints one of cancer's protective cloaks and investigates a way to remove it”.

Targeted therapy or molecularly targeted therapy is one of the major modalities of medical treatment for cancer, others being hormonal therapy and cytotoxic chemotherapy. As a form of molecular medicine, targeted therapy blocks the growth of cancer cells by interfering with specific targeted molecules needed for carcinogenesis and tumor growth.

Dr. Aref said, “It is believed from the 100 years ago that immune system has this ability to attack tumor cells. We know that T cells can be programmed and then find tumor cells as an enemy, but according to the scientists, just 40 to 50 percent of patients can be cured by this method.

“The main questions is why the other half cannot withstand the consequence of cancer by the nature of the immune system and how we can train our immune system to activate self-defense strategy?” he added.“ We have engineered T cell and the immune checkpoint method to use different antibodies to activate T cells”.

He asserted, “We believe that in the next 10 years cancer can be completely cured by the combination of immunotherapy and target therapy and personalized medicine, but we cannot eliminate cancer from the society forever”.